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Kindle Notes & Highlights
“You got yourself in a pickle this time. No two ways about it. That husband of yours won’t stop till you and your baby draw your last breath. You don’t even look like yourself no more. He broke bout every piece of sweet in you. You gonna let him break your spirit, too? You gonna do nothing?”
Today was beating number three since I got legal.
The face in the cracked mirror shows another loose tooth, a split lip, and a eye turning purple. I don’t see me no more in that slice of looking glass. It’s a strange feeling thinking the face in the mirror is somebody else.
“You knock them fake stars outta your blind eyes, Sadie Blue, or you gonna lay with the devil and live in hell.
put one foot in front of the other and walk the line on a rocky road to nowhere.
Like on those three stillbirth days when I worked so hard, and the babies come out dead.
“A body lives a life as good as she can, Gladys Hicks, one day at a time.”
I was born, my folks don’t live in Baines Creek in the highlands of North Carolina like now.
wondered how many sins Walter Hicks carried to damnation in that charred, black soul of his. He beat on Gladys cause she stayed. He beat on Carly till she run away.
It’s the same tired story these hills hear a million times. A nasty boy who can’t keep his britches buttoned. A coward who sneaked his daddy’s hooch to find courage.
Every woman needs to be loved like my Willis loved me.
They beat them because they can and no one stops them. I’ve talked often to Sheriff Loyal Sykes about this kind of crime, and every time he says, “The law’s pretty helpless in private matters like this. Nobody talks or presses charges, and our hands get tied.”
Phrases such as retarded frontier and hillbillies stymie understanding. Disturbing photos of emaciated people, dismal data on teen pregnancies, incest, and genetic deficiencies point to desperate needs in Appalachia.
“You one of them gall-dang liberals, aren’t you? Trying to bend the laws. Change the natural order of things.”
this has always been an isolated community, stretching across parts of thirteen states, a parallel existence, backward from the civilized world that has morphed into the modern day, leaving these people behind. With their isolation come foreign dialects they’ve held tight to,
five hours since the explosion rocked this coal town at five thirty this morning, trapping ninety-nine men. It’s a sad situation…”
“We’ve been told two dozen miners escaped right after the explosion before we got here. They’re badly burned and have been taken to Morgantown, but we don’t know…”
He let me dig on his land cause I plant back what I take.
to her, but she’s got too much valley
“Roy done got shot.”
He done what for me? Killed Roy? Roy thought Billy was a nobody. Billy’s crazy is what he is.
Life in 1970 Appalachia (and fictional Baines Creek) was undeniably hard and harsh.
